US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1300.1.pdf

by dave1629 • 1 year ago

412 940 1 year ago

storage.courtlistener.com

the_duke• 1 year ago

Key quotes:

"Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
"independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
"We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
"The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
"An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
"the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."

I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.

It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.

NitpickLawyer2• 1 year ago

I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.

What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.

Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?

MatthiasPortzel• 1 year ago

The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data…

Google, for example, bought exclusive access to Reddit's data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best model, that wouldn't be a problem.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space?

Yes? I'm not sure why you find this strange. It's exactly how antitrust works.

sidibe2• 1 year ago

A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index.

B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools.

Good luck with that YC...

scarface_7419• 1 year ago

And Netflix shouldn’t have been able to extend its monopoly in shipping DVDs to streaming

DrillShopper4• 1 year ago

That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock).

Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.

pbhjpbhj2• 1 year ago

Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).

This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.

Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).

I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.

So, yes, I agree.

itopaloglu83• 1 year ago

The number of searches started to decline and everybody knows that Google is going to start pouring all their cash into AI tools now.

It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from getting into AI search space and even gain access to their search index data so that they can train their own models on it.

Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.

hedora• 1 year ago

Much better idea:

1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.

2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.

darth_avocado3• 1 year ago

So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.

I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…

Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.

echelon11• 1 year ago

Monopolies prevent startups from reaching critical mass.

Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could form.

Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease, kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax non-innovation.

We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.

alabastervlog4• 1 year ago

More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.

That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.

darth_avocado3• 1 year ago

I wholeheartedly support antitrust enforcement. My comment was mostly about VC firms having very specific opinions on what should happen.

scarface_7419• 1 year ago

Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. They get rich and pawn their money losing investments to the “bigger fool”

https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...

In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%

And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public

throwanem2• 1 year ago

People act in furtherance of their interests, yes. Was there more you had meant to say?

cryptonector• 1 year ago

"People act in furtherance of their interests, yes" [by invoking the power of the State].

There, FTFY. It was implied, was it not?

Perhaps that is what should happen here, but let's not quibble about it.

jeroenhd7• 1 year ago

You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.

They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.

xyzzy95635• 1 year ago

Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.

nicce2• 1 year ago

Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to.

If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?

xyzzy95635• 1 year ago

It's the only reasonable option because they did the best job making a search engine. The competitors have search engines but their software is worse.

voytec5• 1 year ago

No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.

xyzzy95635• 1 year ago

But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.

repelsteeltje• 1 year ago

Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years

They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?

xnx2• 1 year ago

Who knows when or if this current AI wave would've happened without Google.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.

I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.

nixonaddiction• 1 year ago

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

Ajedi322• 1 year ago

It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?

Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.

legitster• 1 year ago

None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.

sidibe2• 1 year ago

Garry Tan is a consumer too!

DonHopkins• 1 year ago

He's been consuming his own exhaust too much.

echelon11• 1 year ago

We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.

By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.

There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.

These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.

Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.

And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.

These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.

amazingamazing3• 1 year ago

The solution is for people to make web apps which are agnostic to platform and device, no?

alabastervlog4• 1 year ago

By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.

I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.

… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.

Workaccount212• 1 year ago

Ironically, Google has always allowed people to side-step the 30% tax.

jeroenhd7• 1 year ago

If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".

Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.

Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.

Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.

The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.

surajrmal7• 1 year ago

Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.

Aerroon2• 1 year ago

About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.

If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.

And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.

briandear2• 1 year ago

Free apps don’t cost any “tax.”

This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation

Is credit card processing, billing, storage, distribution, “free?”

And the 30% figure is inaccurate. Most developers don’t pay that.

How about stripe charging 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction? They are almost double the actual cost of the interchanges.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.

voytec5• 1 year ago

As a result, YC has an interest in ensuring that U.S. technology markets are free from anticompetitive barriers to entry and expansion.

This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.

grg02• 1 year ago

Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.

I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?

amazingamazing3• 1 year ago

Why not make all companies open up their data sets, and stop pay to play?

pvg5• 1 year ago

Because all companies haven't been found to be illegal monopolies? Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding.

codegladiator2• 1 year ago

more like same toll-tax/road-tax for vehicles of all sizes

amazingamazing3• 1 year ago

Pay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars that speed are fined, not just the “big” ones. It’s also a fact that all companies opening up their data would make things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti competitive.

jeroenhd7• 1 year ago

They don't have an illegal monopoly on AI data sets, though? This is attacking a random, unrelated Google branch.

The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for fair and open markets should say enough about how honest their intentions are.

bloppe2• 1 year ago

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

chpatrick• 1 year ago

You can do basic research without being monopolistic.

xyzzy95635• 1 year ago

There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.

jeroenhd7• 1 year ago

That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.

Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.

Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.

I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.

bloppe2• 1 year ago

That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive.

I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.

DrillShopper4• 1 year ago

The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.

Zigurd• 1 year ago

Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell Labs and it was sad.

concinds• 1 year ago

It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").

derektank2• 1 year ago

Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)

I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.

lacy_tinpot• 1 year ago

What monopoly?

Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.

nmz• 1 year ago

How?

The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.

echelon11• 1 year ago

Google is the reason for the current AI boom.

OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?

If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

That you are unaware of the applications of transformers is on you, not them. Search query understanding, search result ranking, translation, voice recognition, all other natural language applications, and generative applications like Gmail Smart Compose are all based on transformer architecture.

currymj• 1 year ago

The BERT model, which uses the transformer architecture, was deployed by Google for every English language Google search by the end of 2019.

This is about concurrent with OpenAI's release of GPT-2. But GPT-2 was not really a product.

victorbjorklund• 1 year ago

I usef BERT before chatgpt was a thing.

jayd16• 1 year ago

They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that going big on these models was worth it.

luckydata3• 1 year ago

OpenAi just decided they could jump the gun while Google CORRECTLY deemed the tech not ready yet. What you're breaking your neck to find fault with was Google being responsible.

philipov• 1 year ago

You're saying this would hinder LLM research? Don't threaten me with a good time.

ViktorRay• 1 year ago

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.

Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.

If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.

By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.

Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.

wslh2• 1 year ago

Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the public domain. This also supports the view that the current state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the past and those who came before (living or not living elements).

mjcl• 1 year ago

And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).

efavdb• 1 year ago

“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?

dehrmann• 1 year ago

it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled

Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.

ajross3• 1 year ago

Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.

But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.

Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?

I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.

sanderjd4• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really know the history well enough to say whether you're right that breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell Labs was tragic.

Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.

And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.

shadowgovt2• 1 year ago

There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the railways were never more effective than during the days of Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to the bottom on pricing).

... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.

constantcrying• 1 year ago

Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.

Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.

YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.

thomastjeffery5• 1 year ago

Researchers at Google are the reason for the current AI boom.

FTFY

tucnak• 1 year ago

Potato potato

oceanplexian2• 1 year ago

Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.

riku_iki4• 1 year ago

Actually, most researchers of transformer paper founded various startups.

oofbaroomf• 1 year ago

A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022 was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.

riku_iki4• 1 year ago

Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention layer, which was not invented at google.

pyrale• 1 year ago

YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.

croes2• 1 year ago

Kings and nobles funded many scientists, do want to take their money and power away?

lesuorac• 1 year ago

Isn't this actually an argument for breaking up Google?

They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?

ldjkfkdsjnv5• 1 year ago

Yup. Arguably could not have invented the transformer without the resources of a behemoth like google

beagle32• 1 year ago

Juergen Schmidhuber and his students came up with much of the basic NN elements, such as RNN, LSTM and others without behemoth resources (and several years earlier). Ttbomk, the one thing they DIDN’T come up with was the transformer; however it is very likely someone would have within a 5-10 year time frame.

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

I’m pretty sure we didn’t need a global Monopoly on the Internet to come up with the paper “attention is all you need” written by eight people.

BrenBarn10• 1 year ago

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.

hu33• 1 year ago

These are the key points as I understand them:

Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.

YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:

- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.

- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.

- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.

- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.

IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.

ksec• 1 year ago

Would YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.

DrillShopper4• 1 year ago

Of course they wouldn't. If it puts green in Paul Graham's pocket then YC is all for it.

ants_everywhere• 1 year ago

Are they considering the ramifications of encouraging courts to let businesses loot their rivals for profit?

Seems like the court system may not be the best way to compete

koolba• 1 year ago

They’re probably advising a startup that does exactly that as a service. Lawfare-as-a-service would have incredible margins!

bubblethrow• 1 year ago

Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google was run by Sam Altman.

threeseed5• 1 year ago

To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:

OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.

So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.

Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...

ldjkfkdsjnv5• 1 year ago

This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless

jrmg• 1 year ago

AI will democratize search regardless

What do you mean by this and how will it happen?

ldjkfkdsjnv5• 1 year ago

companies like perplexity, as the models get better, competing on search will be trivial

azemetre3• 1 year ago

It usually means that they will somehow rat fuck the public commons for monetary gain.

Democratic software means three things:

1. Can you understand it

2. Can you influence it both now and after your death

3. Can you destroy it

I don’t see how any of these things apply to AI, I’m sure it will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of others.

almostgotcaught• 1 year ago

AI will democratize search regardless

Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.

voytec5• 1 year ago

No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.

slater• 1 year ago

Am I misremembering, or doesn’t Apple already have its own “stealth” search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat, but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn I read about it a decade ago in breathless “Is Apple working on its own search engine???” articles

lolinder15• 1 year ago

Which market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]).

In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1].

In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.

So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...

drivebyhooting2• 1 year ago

Bing has a brand problem.

aoeusnth12• 1 year ago

all that would make sense, but Bing is worse. Wasting money building a bad product does not entitle you to market share.

aoeusnth12• 1 year ago

That argument might make sense if Bing was as good, but Bing is worse. Wasting money building a bad product does not entitle you to market share.

luckydata3• 1 year ago

Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all and that any viable business of the same form has to look the same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be a money pit. It's a synergistic business.

bdangubic2• 1 year ago

Microsoft does compete in the marketplace

They compete much like I compete for People’s Most Beautiful Man in the World :)

georgeecollins• 1 year ago

A shareholder in those companies wouldn’t support it. You could easily spend $10b trying to win back a fraction of the search market and Google could just spend $10b back to greater effect to bury you. Google is entrenched at every level: consumer awareness, browser, SEO, advertisers, ad-tech.

timewizard• 1 year ago

A country as large and prosperous as the United States should have more than 4 providers. We should have more than 3 cellular companies. We should have more than 8 major ISPs.

These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.

YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands today.

light_hue_13• 1 year ago

We don't have 8 major ISPs. That's a joke.

We have 8 monoplies that live together.

I have never once lived in a house where I had a choice of ISP in the US (unless you count getting a mobile router).

brap• 1 year ago

It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.

Google is being competitive.

YC is being anti-competitive.

Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.

Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.

And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.

caesil• 1 year ago

Standard Oil is being competitive.

The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive.

Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.

Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”.

And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.

(I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)

visarga• 1 year ago

Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

It doesn't matter whether the monopoly position was achieved "fairly" or not. Either way it is detrimental to the overall health of the economy and to consumer choice, and that alone is good enough reason to bust them. Those laws were passed for a reason - people saw what the end result looked like, and they didn't like it.

If you don't want someone to come and bust a monopoly you've spent years and billions building, then don't use your time and money to build a monopoly.

Workaccount212• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.

So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"

redczar2• 1 year ago

Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.

BobbyJo2• 1 year ago

They could almost certainly prevent it in most cases, and they likely promote it in some.

kmeisthax• 1 year ago

What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league.

The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.

Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:

- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+

- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list

- Video: Google Video

Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:

- Homegrown: Search, Gmail

- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)

Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.

scarmig• 1 year ago

DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)

"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.

Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.

threeseed5• 1 year ago

a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.

b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.

dang2• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.

I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.

YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than that.

bionhoward2• 1 year ago

Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.

Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.

Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)

I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)

azemetre3• 1 year ago

Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.

There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.

bionhoward2• 1 year ago

Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps.

Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.

Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/

jeremyjh• 1 year ago

OpenAI is hardly a Goliath. It has no real moat, and is trying to build a business around a feature. But other businesses already have platforms with billions of users to deploy those features to.

nicce2• 1 year ago

As others have pointed out, we should see the forest from the trees. Microsoft is a huge OpenAI redistributor, also Apple. Everyone knows ”ChatGPT”. While the company size might not be monopoly, based on a larger userbase, it is.

nickfromseattle2• 1 year ago

How much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen under his watch.

Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?

Or was this outcome inevitable?

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

Yes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as reliant on search/ads.

hshshshshsh2• 1 year ago

Did the laws of physics change or something before Sundar became CEO?

NO? Yeah. I thought so as well

Then the outcome was inevitable.

xiphias2• 1 year ago

AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.

fundaThree• 1 year ago

It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.

JustExAWS3• 1 year ago

So no YC companies are healthy…

Seattle35032• 1 year ago

but data isn’t the deciding factor.

That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.

beambot• 1 year ago

This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...

Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.

If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.

Someone steelman this for me...?

lolinder15• 1 year ago

seems much less anti-competitive by nature

It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:

* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.

* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.

Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.

cyanydeez• 1 year ago

Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.

s1artibartfast4• 1 year ago

Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

HaZeust• 1 year ago

Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.

felineflock• 1 year ago

YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.

Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.

From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.

croes2• 1 year ago

Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.

The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.

Not really less anti-competitive.

skybrian3• 1 year ago

By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of Firefox.

On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

BuyMyBitcoins• 1 year ago

Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be “let Microsoft monitor your entire browsing experience”.

I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.

sofixa5• 1 year ago

Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser, Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a day.

And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.

r0m4n02• 1 year ago

As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed

gnaman• 1 year ago

that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them

r0m4n02• 1 year ago

More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward

hermannj314• 1 year ago

Is an Amicus brief just a way the legal profession sells ad space in high profile cases?

You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.

snielson• 1 year ago

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

luckydata3• 1 year ago

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.

ketzo• 1 year ago

Really? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead in the ad markets.

alabastervlog4• 1 year ago

If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.

riku_iki4• 1 year ago

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.

it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.

I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.

const_cast7• 1 year ago

I don't know, I don't think it will.

I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.

Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).

mullingitover2• 1 year ago

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.

It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.

My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.

hkpack• 1 year ago

Most of the tech is set for being a monopoly due to the negligible variable cost associated with serving a customer.

Thus being even slightly in front of others is reinforced and the gap only widens.

oceanplexian2• 1 year ago

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.

How so?

A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

https://commoncrawl.org/

This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).

Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.

mattmaroon5• 1 year ago

Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.

wslh2• 1 year ago

so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.

I think it's also important to highlight that sites explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically able to crawl them.

shadowgovt2• 1 year ago

Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.

The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).

tananaev• 1 year ago

Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of user data.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site,

Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.

I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.

My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground

I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

CommonCrawl is not a vlaid comparison. Most robots.txt target CCBot.

rubitxxx22• 1 year ago

Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.

Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?

This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)

I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.

486sx33• 1 year ago

Google killed Google. They should not have decided to become evil. Search can easily be removed, G Suite should be separate too.

lolinder15• 1 year ago

Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone

Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.

gamblor956• 1 year ago

You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.

AtlasBarfed3• 1 year ago

I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.

You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.

Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.

I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.

I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.

Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.

Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.

If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.

Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in

ChuckMcM6• 1 year ago

At Blekko we advocated for this as well.

Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.

Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).

Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.

It would be a very different world.

indolering• 1 year ago

Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?

nashashmi• 1 year ago

You mean like a white label search engine? Customized with settings?

fallingknife5• 1 year ago

This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that want access to this data rather than an actual economically valid business model. If building an index and selling access to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an index. Are you selling access to it for profit?

londons_explore2• 1 year ago

Access to the click stream is the big bit.

Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.

Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.

End result: monopoly.

The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.

mike_d2• 1 year ago

Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index

The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.

dang2• 1 year ago

Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:

Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)

CobrastanJorji• 1 year ago

This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.

Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."

sfpotter2• 1 year ago

Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.

tobias3• 1 year ago

Kagi is just a meta search engine. They are already using Googles search index. They just find it too expensive. Guess they need to show ads to pay for the searches.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.

I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?

I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...

giancarlostoro• 1 year ago

This solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.

9cb14c1ec0• 1 year ago

Googles c suite is clearly not thinking ahead here. They could have helped to slow down the anti-trust lawsuits by opening up their search index to whichever AI company wants to pay for it. Web crawling is expensive, and lots of companies are spending wild amounts of money on it. There is a very clear market arbitrage opportunity between the cost of crawling the web and Google's cost of serving up their existing data.

ankit2193• 1 year ago

Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?

If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Separating the index creates a commodity data layer that preserves Google's crawling investment while enabling innovation at the ranking/interface layer, similar to how telecom unbundling worked for ISPs.

Eridrus• 1 year ago

I feel like there's some conceptual drift going on in Kagi's blog post wrt their proposed remedy.

They argue that the search index is an essential facility, and per their link "The essential facilities doctrine attacks a form of exclusionary conduct by which an undertaking controls the conditions of access to an asset forming a ‘bottleneck’ for rivals to compete".

But unlike physical locations where bridges/ports can be built, the ability to crawl the internet is not excludable by Google.

They do argue that the web is not friendly to new crawlers, but what Kagi wants is not just the raw index itself, but also all the serving/ranking built on top of it so that they do not have to re-engineer it themselves.

It's also worth noting that Bing exists, and presumably has it's own index of the web and no evidence has been presented that the raw index content itself is the reason that Bing is not competitive.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

Then you'd just end up with all the ads being scams, and people not wanting to search on Google, because all the top results are scams instead of things they might actually be interested in that are not scams.

tiahura• 1 year ago

How Orwellian. Free market means buyers and sellers set terms of deal, not G.

adrr2• 1 year ago

How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced.

Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.

jonhohle• 1 year ago

I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.

This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)

adrr2• 1 year ago

This is to separate search index from Google.

Ad is even worse as Google doesn’t even control the majority of digital marketing market. Only case i can think of is the Amex case but Supreme Court rightly found you can’t be an abusive monopoly and have less than a majority of the market.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

You can retrofit today's arguments on both the oil industry and phone industry: if you don't want to pay, then don't use it. Both letter and horses where available.

De facto you don't have any choice but using ms and Google these days. Whatever you loose in doing so (if not money, then privacy)

That is a problem and constitutes a macro risk - and henceforth should be handled.

Monopoly is probably the closet describing term.

light_triad• 1 year ago

It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.

bogwog• 1 year ago

and provides liquidity by acquiring startups

You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.

I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.

Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.

threeseed5• 1 year ago

Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.

And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.

creato4• 1 year ago

It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.

At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.

I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.

hu33• 1 year ago

Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.

Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.

prepend4• 1 year ago

Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux.

They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1]

It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.”

[0] https://github.com/appleopen

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

selfhoster8• 1 year ago

Agreed, between Google, Microsoft and Apple, Apple is the worst in not contributing jack back to the world. I can't stand how Microsoft was able to get to their status using evil means but at least the Microsoft of today does give back open and free (at least in beer) products. Google is the best of the three in this regard. Come to think of it, not sure where I'd place Amazon on that scale.

stonogo• 1 year ago

You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.

light_hue_13• 1 year ago

You're right. And that really shows you how destructive Google has been.

10-20 years ago Google was amazing. Their products were great. We all wanted them.

And now, we have pretty much exactly those products. Almost nothing has improved in 10+ years. That's exactly the behavior of a monopoly.

Their products are now aggressively hostile to users and their interests. Like Chrome trying to kill of ad blockers.

Google now sits on what is now a low quality outdated product forever using their market power to keep everyone else out.

That's why we have antitrust laws. To kill Googles.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

Gmail and GMaps were 20 years ago. Chrome, almost 15 years ago.

pingou• 1 year ago

As a google's shareholder that terrifies me.

As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.

mschuster91• 1 year ago

The document metadata... ffs: "Microsoft Word - YC for filing FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief"

People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.

dangoodmanUT• 1 year ago

A bitly link is an insane choice

aspenmayer• 1 year ago

Add + to the end of bitly urls to see where they redirect to without clicking on them.

Workaccount212• 1 year ago

The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it

Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.

Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.

This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.

Hilift• 1 year ago

Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.

ppsreejith• 1 year ago

People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.

Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?

I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.

IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.

grumple• 1 year ago

With Google controlling most devices and browsers, you aren’t getting that control.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

People only want to not pay, when that is an alternative.

We are already seeing a transition.

This is lead by the fact that paying online is much easier than 10 years ago.

And the fact that we are slowly being conaiditoned to paying for online services.

Bender• 1 year ago

In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc... Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?

grg02• 1 year ago

Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?

The Pentagon.

danboarder2• 1 year ago

This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.

So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.

And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.

ChuckMcM6• 1 year ago

I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.

MPSFounder• 1 year ago

I will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using Google less and less these days

danboarder2• 1 year ago

Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?

wvenable• 1 year ago

Search will become AI. It might be that there be zero "AI" players involved though as Google is just as capable of doing AI.

edanm• 1 year ago

I'd take that bet. AI players are already replacing search for a lot of users in a lot of cases.

artursapek• 1 year ago

I’ve started using ChatGPT to look up most things I used to Google. It gives me immediate, concise results without having to parse bloated websites full of ads and other garbage.

Seattle35032• 1 year ago

This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair advantage in the nascent AI market.

drdrek• 1 year ago

Do you think its a coincidence that companies start getting regulated when they are at the end of their rope? I think its the other way around. When Google started to lose power, when alternatives started to pour money into the political system, when jobs and money from alternatives presented themselves, then the wheels of justice began turning. The regulation is caused by googles apparent decline.

sambeau• 1 year ago

The really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale tracking of users from site with analytics to site with analytics.

If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.

RainyDayTmrw3• 1 year ago

Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally.

In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.

sroussey2• 1 year ago

So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?

RainyDayTmrw3• 1 year ago

I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.

owebmaster• 1 year ago

Google started to merge both (ChromeOS+Android) so maybe they would be sold together

iamkonstantin• 1 year ago

It would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where similar constraints apply.

yashvg2• 1 year ago

TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.

yashvg2• 1 year ago

Summarized by o3:

1. Why YC cares

- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.

- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.

2. What YC wants the court to order

- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.

- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.

- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.

- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.

3. Historical playbook YC cites

- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.

- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.

- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.

- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”

4. Why HN should care

- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.

- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.

- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.

- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.

5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.

Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

  - Google Maps
  - Google Mail
  - Google Drive
  - Google Docs
  - Google Groups
  - Google Forms
  - Google Cloud
  - Google OAuth
  - Google Search
  - Google Analytics
  - Chrome
  - Android
  - Android Auto
  - Fitbit
  - Google Fi
  - Google Fiber
  - Google Flights
  - Google Translate
  - Google Pay
  - Waymo

In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.

Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.

There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.

wpm• 1 year ago

Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks.

Better late than never.

worik7• 1 year ago

Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large

I agree

But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea

But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons

wavemode• 1 year ago

It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company

The_Blade3• 1 year ago

somehow, after the ATT, Microsoft, Standard Oil, or American Tobacco antitrust suits, the constituent parts and country soldiered on

x0x0• 1 year ago

This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.

etc.

dataflow2• 1 year ago

Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives.

My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.

cyberax4• 1 year ago

Why would it? Youtube sells ads (and premium subscriptions) on its own. It doesn't really need the rest of Google, and can just continue living as a separate company.

worik7• 1 year ago

ta. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.

The problem is one company with all the data.

ardacinar• 1 year ago

Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

suddenexample• 1 year ago

People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.

fsh2• 1 year ago

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

sofixa5• 1 year ago

Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc.

In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before

FridayoLeary• 1 year ago

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing.

Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.

How is this a desirable outcome?

The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.

echelon11• 1 year ago

We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with.

Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.

I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.

dvdhnt• 1 year ago

This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?

TechDebtDevin3• 1 year ago

What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...

actinium2263• 1 year ago

I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available?

Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.

And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.

And don't even get me started on gmail!

scarface_7419• 1 year ago

The list is mostly BS. Android doesn’t even have a majority market share in any of those services except for Search related services.

And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.

ocdtrekkie• 1 year ago

Google collapsing would be an incredible gift to the economy. Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget, before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We all pay an incredible amount for Google's existence, and a massive renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped sucking all of the air out of the room.

Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.

ardit33• 1 year ago

This is juvenile thinking... none of them will go away. They can be independent services themselves, and be pretty profitable at it.

The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.

root_axis• 1 year ago

Most would go away and be replaced by another monopolist. Likely Microsoft or Apple.

hamilyon2• 1 year ago

Android in this list stands out.

If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who?

All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.

nativeit• 1 year ago

A non-profit collective of device manufacturers and software developers could probably create a very effective and potent steward for Android's long-term development. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

rs1863• 1 year ago

I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in Android, or Android is delivering many features these days -- Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped getting excited about or even caring about major version updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very mature and stable.

p1necone2• 1 year ago

The bulk of Android is open source, the only proprietary bits are the google services.

nataliste• 1 year ago

What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand.

Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.

Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.

ccppurcell2• 1 year ago

I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?

janalsncm2• 1 year ago

Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy would go on. It’s competitors are probably worse but it wouldn’t cause a run on the banks, which is a specific financial emergency.

worik7• 1 year ago

Yes please

The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment dreadfully

Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is positively destructive

Good riddance Google.

janalsncm2• 1 year ago

Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”.

Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.

cyberax4• 1 year ago

Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.

I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.

Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.

Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.

rs1863• 1 year ago

To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to death.

karaterobot• 1 year ago

For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.

rs1863• 1 year ago

Let them die. The world will be a better place.

Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:

* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary

* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.

* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.

Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:

* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi

I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.

Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.

Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.

doctorpangloss2• 1 year ago

YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...

braza2• 1 year ago

Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.

Hard to agree on this one.

Most of the time when I’m the country side of Hungary and some Nordic countries Google Translator it’s essential for communication of foreigners that lives I those places. I can tell several anecdotes of international people being able to communicate with their local in-laws via Google Translator conversational feature; or even cases of people being able to read after a mechanical translation.

light_hue_13• 1 year ago

Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse.

Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.

All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.

trevor-e• 1 year ago

When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.

cmrdporcupine• 1 year ago

It's also stopped being great.

AlexandrB3• 1 year ago

Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.

What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.

sandipagr• 1 year ago

I remember Hipmunk, it was horrible! Google flights is by far the best flight search platform, competition aren't even close. 10x faster search of flights and the calendar view for prices is incredible!

I consider Google Maps to be the best application ever created. Products like Google Mail, Calendar, Search, Chrome, Android are absolutely best in class. To call them inferior is laughable.

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

That's the very reason we need to break down Google.

It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast.

Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i revolution.

Xelbair• 1 year ago

And?

If monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.

theptip• 1 year ago

In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

I think there are better options than you suggest.

The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.

This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million.

But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.

Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.

gazpacho• 1 year ago

I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.

michaelt2• 1 year ago

Android? [...] who / how are they going to be funded?

Given that Android gets to take a 30% cut of every app sale and in-app purchase, I think they'll survive.

andelink• 1 year ago

My understanding is that the legal remedies/repercussions being considered involve divesting Android, Chrome. Splitting these off is not in any way killing Googles core business.

notepad0x90• 1 year ago

Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.

DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.

taormina• 1 year ago

We understand the consequences. The only projects listed that matter are the open source ones. They’ll survive. The rest don’t matter and will die as they frankly would’ve already if not for Google unfair position in the market.

BeetleB2• 1 year ago

Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

Google Translate has been inferior to DeepL for a very long time now.

More recently, LLMs will offer far better translation than anything else.

stevage• 1 year ago

How do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.

quitit2• 1 year ago

They'd have to adapt their business models, the likelihood of the services disappearing are minimal because they each have multiple revenue streams beyond just collecting user data. Indeed we know it's possible because much of the list are me-too products from those which have different business models.

Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place.

Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor.

Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services.

As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.

morkalork• 1 year ago

Why is this bad? All those services are areas where there could be interesting competition if google didn't strangle them at birth by subsidizing their own version with infinite ad monies. Take google docs as an example, everyone is talking about on shoring essential services now that the USA has become a security threat to other countries. Before now, imagine any European company trying to justify investment for building a docs competitor when google just gives it away? Yeah sure, your data stays on the continent but that wasn't put into perspective until recently.

everdrive• 1 year ago

You just listed a bunch of things I'd like to see go.

627467• 1 year ago

Isn't it depressing that a single private company wield such influence in society that Stockholm syndrome develops? I don't know about you, but accepting this is true is way worse than loosing gapps

dannycastonguay• 1 year ago

Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company?

Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board.

Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.

zelphirkalt4• 1 year ago

I would rather have us all weaned off the Google services. That would be a great outcome actually. I am guessing your idea is, that those 2 or 4 Googles would then compete and make better products. But I am not sure how likely it is, that they can fix the mess and pile of bloat, that their software is.

jodrellblank• 1 year ago

Because that's conceptually simple. With your idea, you cannot clone the domain 'gmail.com' so one of these must happen:

- one company gets control of gmail.com and the other has to register a new domain nobody has ever heard of.

- the companies share control of gmail.com and users see no changes.

Anyone who must upend their digital life (email, contacts, Android login, YouTube login, analytics, 'login with Google' around the web, payment data, etc. etc.) has a problem, the company which gets the domain has a massive advantage. If they share it how are they competing with each other, which one can change the Gmail experience or pricing scheme?

Similar with GCP, which split gets to run a big customer's services? The customer isn't going to pay twice for them to be cloned. Does the customer have to update all their logins and API keys and contracts and payment details?

Who owns all the Exabytes of pre-existing YouTube data and what happens to all the ISP peering and CDN server hosting contracts which run it?

What happens to the legal contracts, tax deals to have offices in certain countries, employee visas, paying the datacenter maintenance bills or office cleaning bills? If the employees sit next to each other and now one works for Google_A and keeps everything the same, the other works for Google_1 and has to move to a new office which hasn't been built yet... same problem as Gmail but internally, one company gets a big advantage the other gets a big disruption.

What happens when you algorithmically split employees 'to avoid chaos' but one company ends up with no senior people who have access to a certain system?

Since we didn't ask for our accounts to be copied to Google1, do hundreds of millions of us have send Google1 a 'delete my account' request to get rid of them? If I delete my account from GoogleA do they have access and legal right to delete the copy from Google1 as well? If they don't, does my deleted login to GoogleA still work backed by the copy of my account on Google1, because there is only one GMail.com domain and it has to keep working?

It's conceptually easier to say maps.google.com is under control of a new company, not subsidised by Google Advertising income, and it needs to compete with other map providers, even if technically it's hard to extract the accounts and data from Google's server infrastructure.

Jach2• 1 year ago

It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.

The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)

In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.

josephg5• 1 year ago

Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites.

If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.

madeofpalk• 1 year ago

Waymo has zero business existing as some adtech-funded side project.

If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.

fibers3• 1 year ago

- Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it)

  - Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton

  - Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc

  - Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space

  - Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that
 
 - Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor

  - Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure

  - Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail.

  - Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break

  - Google Analytics - lol
 
 - Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox

  - Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void?

  - Android Auto - lol 

  - Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore

  - Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right?

  - Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it

  - Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out

  - Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs
  - Google Pay - lol

  - Waymo - lol

matheusmoreira3• 1 year ago

I like your style, "lol" is the appropriate response to the notion of losing Google's entire list of products.

Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?

bernardom• 1 year ago

They won't be killed, they'll be forced to stand up as their own businesses, like the Baby Bells after Ma Bell broke up, or the split of Standard Oil.

I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.

Workaccount212• 1 year ago

The problem is that it is ingrained in people that these services are free, and the only way they are free is by having them feed a centralized ad network.

philistine• 1 year ago

Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads.

Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices.

I don't buy it.

redwall_hp• 1 year ago

Exactly. Each one of the products in that large list is a separate market that's being distorted by a monopoly. This is all the more evidence that Google needs to be broken up into very tiny pieces.

If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.

matheusmoreira3• 1 year ago

Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them.

Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.

Let it happen.

In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.

Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.

Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.

Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.

The whole web will shrink

Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.

huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear

This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?

Let it disappear.

Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.

davidgerard• 1 year ago

You've made literally an argument to nationalise Google and make it into a government department - not to leave it to fester.

BrenBarn10• 1 year ago

If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.

It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.

itsoktocry• 1 year ago

Smaller banks aren't competitive with larger (global) banks.

like_any_other• 1 year ago

That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point

They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.

jahsome3• 1 year ago

I'm reading your comment as "someone should have done something a long time ago so it's not worth considering the consequences of doing it now."

That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.

animal_spirits5• 1 year ago

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.

brookst• 1 year ago

This is an incredibly hyperbolic take.

Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.

It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.

From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.

FridgeSeal• 1 year ago

Oh no.

What a shame.

Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair

mathfailure• 1 year ago

We're gonna be fine without all those items from that list. There are plenty of alternatives and plenty more would arise once the monopolist sinks.

dangus• 1 year ago

What a lame take on this.

To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market?

Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert.

Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.

apwell23• 1 year ago

Fitbit

google is killing that themselves.

- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay

won't miss these

joe_the_user• 1 year ago

Yeah, the unfortunate thing is reigning in one monopolist today seems like more an invitation to the other monopolists.

How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia...

It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.

yellow_postit3• 1 year ago

This list makes the case this is long overdue.

double0jimb0• 1 year ago

Yup, ok with all of those.

windexh8er3• 1 year ago

I have actively moved away from all of these services you listed years ago. The only one that is truly impactful is Gmail, again because of the monopoly they have in mail. But I don't understand your argument. There are options and you're worried about Apple, yet admit they don't have competing products in many of those segments.

Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.

randall• 1 year ago

Google Cloud is a decent business though, as is YouTube.

jofzar• 1 year ago

My favourite one that you somehow missed, which should probably be at the top, YouTube.

jmatthews• 1 year ago

You essentially outline why it should be broken up.

I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.

Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.

gpt5• 1 year ago

Google is a monopoly

This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore.

When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?

robertlagrant3• 1 year ago

Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

What is monopoly pricing?

YetAnotherNick2• 1 year ago

Google is an ad monopoly and ad business should be broken up somehow(I don't know how). Here we are breaking up every business other than ad business.

intended2• 1 year ago

I think the point here is that it should be done carefully and thoughtfully.

roywashere• 1 year ago

If Chrome would need to be sold off, or Android, or Maps, those can only become even more pressured to be monetized for user data, I’m afraid

harrison_clarke2• 1 year ago

i like an ad monopoly. it makes ads cost more

selfhoster8• 1 year ago

You essentially outline why it should be broken up.

I disagree:

    1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests.
    2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird videos. We pay for YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime which we watch on Chrome and Netflix is free with T-Mobile. All courtesy of Chrome and Linux. Chrome is the leading browser. We don't want Edge as our main browser, even though it uses Chrome underneath it, like Windows 11 (which we also don't use) is loaded with Microsoftie crap and garbage.
    3) We have individual FREE Gmail accounts for our individual interests.
    4) I have my own FREE YouTube account for tech videos.
    5) We use only FREE Google Maps, the other map services suck in comparison.
    6) We pay $2 a month for Google Drive because it works well (although there is still no Linux client) it works well in the browser (any browser). Amazon's deal for uploading files doesn't work as fluently, tried it. Microsoft OneDrive works OK but only for large single compressed files in my experience, it gets confused with small files and especially borks .git folders.
    7) Google Search, even in the age of AI (or what we are all calling "AI") is still the  best search engine.
    8) There is no way I will ever use an iPhone. Microsoft got out of the phone market which is great since the only thing I can't stand more than Apple products like Mac (which I am forced to use at work because our COO is a die hard Apple fanboy).. is Windows. That leaves Android which has worked extremely well and is technically FREE except the two biggest vendors are Google and Samsung and in this case, Google sucks because we've had several Google phones and a tablet and all quit working too soon, became useless too soon or batteries failed too soon and Samsung is even worse than Microsoft at loading crap and garbage on their phones.
    9) We pay for everything with FREE Google Pay, it works extremely well and doesn't cost us a dime to use.

Windows, the crap that it is, is the monopoly which is incredible because the OS sucks but not as bad as Mac. We should all be using Linux laptops and desktops.

loki49152• 1 year ago

"You essentially outline why it should be broken up."

No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.

"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."

No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.

dcow2• 1 year ago

I genuinely do not use a single service on your list and my life is absolutely indistinguishable from that of one who does. I’m digitally literate and normally functional. Do people really believe these services are irreplaceable let alone the best of the best? That’s the trap…

scarface_7419• 1 year ago

Or it will force Google to charge for services - a much more honest transaction.

And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.

alextingle• 1 year ago

Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players.

That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.

FilosofumRex2• 1 year ago

They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.

No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.

Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.

seangrogg• 1 year ago

And nothing of value was lost.

odyssey7• 1 year ago

I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.

The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.

airspresso• 1 year ago

Yes, some companies certainly avoid using Google Cloud due to the strong link between Google and advertising. Especially in Europe you'll find that kind of sentiment. Pushing them to strongly prefer AWS for all things cloud.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

I don't have the right answer for this as in how to handle this - but this is needed.

Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!

DashAnimal• 1 year ago

No more dangerous than somebody photoshopping when we saw the rise of figma, ubering when Lyft just posted a great quarter with stock buybacks, or skyping when, well, the product doesn't exist anymore.

yoaviram• 1 year ago

If what you are saying is that significant parts of the tech landscape will change, then that's exactly the point.

dev_l1x_be2• 1 year ago

Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.

rootsudo• 1 year ago

You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad...

I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?

And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.

hilbert426• 1 year ago

"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."

Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.

OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.

If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).

Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.

Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated.

I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.

Now with that in mind give me your solutions.

hilbert426• 1 year ago

"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."

Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.

Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things.

I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.

Now with that in mind give me your solutions.

ramijames• 1 year ago

+ Waze.

Uptrenda• 1 year ago

Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.

franga2000• 1 year ago

A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).

Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.

The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.

bradley132• 1 year ago

So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying.

The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.

Create• 1 year ago

  - OpenStreetMap, MapLibre
  - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota
  - Nextcloud, Seafile
  - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad
  - Discourse, Flarum
  - LimeSurvey Framaforms
  - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix
  - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH
  - Qwant, DuckDuckGo
  - Matomo, Plausible Analytics
  - Firefox, Brave
  - LineageOS, /e/ OS
  - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux)
  - Open Health, Gadgetbridge
  - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
  - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various)
  - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus
  - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral
  - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK)
  - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity

FMecha3• 1 year ago

Firefox

Mozilla is dependent on Google money.

Brave

Chromium-based (another engine monopoly on itself) and crypto connections (if you're not a fan of them).

fibers3• 1 year ago

thank you for these good alternatives. I will take a look at them later

openplatypus2• 1 year ago

Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad

+ OnlyOffice

Qwant, DuckDuckGo

+ Mojeek

Matomo, Plausible Analytics

+ Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics

Firefox, Brave

+ Vivaldi

GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota

+ Infomaniak, Mailo, Runbox

and tons of others

coderatlarge• 1 year ago

i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.

DyslexicAtheist• 1 year ago

digital advertisement is a mass-surveillance technology in the hands of corporations. I cheer its collapse

ArinaS2• 1 year ago

If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.

starfezzy2• 1 year ago

That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

Who's gonna tell him?

ironbound• 1 year ago

Yes, we should break it up so new startups can work in the space!

imiric• 1 year ago

You're talking like there are no alternatives to all of these products. There are, and not just from Apple. The reason Google's products are popular is because they're advertised as being "free", and Google has enough resources to run them as loss leaders, while also exerting pressure as a giant corporation and monopoly.

If they happen to disappear tomorrow it would cause a minor disruption in the markets, but the world would quickly adjust, and smaller companies would have a chance at competing. Until a new monopoly pops up, and governments are "forced" to break them up again. The circle of capitalism.

necovek• 1 year ago

The point is that splitting Google Ads business from eg. Google Maps business will make GAds company and GMaps company set up a mutually beneficial business arrangement — not much needs to change there!

The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what it has done starting from Google Search which it never really monetized as a business but instead jumped into advertising even though it was set up because founders hated online ads).

It's tricky to stop this from the get go, because you want to encourage investment into different markets from established companies.

Free markets are known not to be able to stop this, which is why we've got anti-monopoly laws all around the world.

stingraycharles• 1 year ago

Yes, the point is that the ad company should become the middle man, like things used to be before everything consolidated into Google.

People have valuable data? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to display targeted ads? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to buy targeted ads? Buy it from a middle man.

Not everything consolidated into a single company.

The whole infrastructure and market already exists, the problem is that Google has a monopoly on certain data and it’s abusing its position.

perlgeek• 1 year ago

Let's take Android. Who has a revenue stream and needs Android? All the major phone vendors except Apple.

They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too.

Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death.

Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units.

And so son...

casey22• 1 year ago

Firstly you forgot YouTube. The vast majorities of these have alternatives that have existed before and currently, and of course none of these will "die". If they can’t be profitable without a monopoly, then consumers and businesses shouldn’t be overcharged for the services they depend on just to keep "Fitbit" afloat.

In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple

Then Apple will be broken up.

yujzgzc2• 1 year ago

All monopolies plow a fraction of their wins into loss leaders that look generous. Apple grabs a take on developer sales? It's to maintain a high quality app environment. AT&T is distorting prices in the long distance market? They use it to make local telephony a lot more affordable. Etc etc.

It often kills competition. Absent cross subsidies from the gusher of ad money, maybe Opera, Firefox, Garmin would have a chance to compete again in the browser and GPS world. Maybe Chinese companies that develop entry-level Docs alternatives (Lark) would enter the Docs market more favorably.

The alternative is not that all of Google's services stop existing, but that competition gets restored on a more even playing field.

mlsu• 1 year ago

God forbid we allow other browser vendors and email providers to compete!

Look outside. Competitors to _all_ of those product segments exist, there is a huge amount of untapped value waiting to be provided to consumers! They’re limping along, because there is a monopoly in the market distorting prices to maintain their market share.

“But just think: wherever will you get high quality oil if not for Standard! Think of the global economy!”

ReptileMan3• 1 year ago

If it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

openplatypus2• 1 year ago

Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

From your list, I (+family, circle of friends and most non-StartUp businesses) only use Android so yes, I can imagine a life without these.

Bring it on.

rzwitserloot• 1 year ago

I think it was Heinlein who came up with it, but it's a principle that basic logic dictates is obvious:

Power and Responsibility - those must be 2 sides of the same coin, or very very bad things happen.

The mindset of 'too big to fail', i.e. if things go badly wrong there, government must bail it out for the sake of avoiding seriously deleterious effects on the wider populace, more or less nixes out the responsibility part of the chain there, at least for 'the company' as a whole. At least, the way bailouts have so far been done with banks, which is basically: Give em money, _possibly_ require some sacrifices amongst the board or c-level execs, but the company continues effectively independently.

And, wouldn'tcha know it, bad things happen when you do that.

"Too big to fail" is, to me anyway, all I need to hear. If that's true: Kill that company. Right now. And do a governmental post mortem on how government could have failed so badly as to have just let it happen without writing out laws and regulations to stop it. Too big to fail is a really, really bad thing to ever happen. The only thing that should ever be too big to fail is the government itself. Where there certainly _is_ a balance between power and responsibility: If government fucks up badly enough, very bad things happen to what it represents, namely, the people.

Therefore then, if the consequences are indeed as gigantic as you say they are, then there are only two options:

1. Bite the bullet, split up google, suffer the consequences, and then find ways to break up any other companies that are 'too big to fail', and find out ways to write laws to avoid it from happening again.

2. Government writes some laws to eminent-domain it, so that it becomes part of government, so that bailouts can be done without breaking the balance between power and responbility.

Of course, given the current political climate in the US, that will never happen. But logic dictates that it should.

At any rate: Yeah, it's going to hurt. And it should be done.

Your final 3 paragraphs are missing the mark entirely. They just do not make any logical sense.

If google gets completely asploded by law, you think they all move to apple and apple will turn itself into a monopoly? After it just saw government make a meal out of google? That seems epically stupid, but then a judge just more or less literally called Tim Cook epically stupid for deciding to just flaunt a court judgement, so, sure, let's say Tim Cook did not learn his lesson and remains blind to this. Then.. government will make a meal of apple just the same. Once the first 'tech company too big to fail breaking monopoly laws gets thrown through a meat grinder' has concluded, the meat grinder is built and functional, so (threatening to) toss apple through it is easy at that point, relatively speaking.

I also think you're underestimating the viability of the web and the pernicious brokenness of where we are at today. If google ads just collapses overnight, however will people find stores? That's your argument? That it will simply be impossible to find the online presence of some store or other? I.. doubt that.

A whole company will just disappear because gmail failed? Proton costs 3.50 a seat a month, and that's just to make the point that the most gold plated alternative I know about does not seem like a company killer. Everything google does has an alternative. If a company cannot deal with the fallout of inventorying the services that it uses and making a decision on which alternative to employ plus the costs associated with updating their employees and policies to deal with it, that company was operating on a highly risky precipice already, if the margins are that low. Something was going to unbalance that company and it would fall into the abyss sooner rather than later. Might as well be this.

f1shy• 1 year ago

Of all the things you listed, I swear, only used maps in the last decade. All other I avoid them because I find them terribly bad. And I only use maps because is the one I remember the URL fast.

grues-dinner3• 1 year ago

Chrome

Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good.

Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money.

Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

"Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies."

How many were developed by Google; how many were Google acquisitions.

These "arguments" are so weak, so desperate, they only expose Google's culpability even further. Silicon Valley routinely obfuscates, misdirects and even lies under oath. It's difficult to make convincing arguments absent any credibility.

legtar3• 1 year ago

You are completely wrong here, where are lots off alternative for these tools.

hshshshshsh2• 1 year ago

Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.

jmward01• 1 year ago

Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?

PunchTornado• 1 year ago

These people have financial interests in destroying google. Why would a judge take their opinion into consideration?

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here...

I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful.

If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.

ezfe4• 1 year ago

There are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly:

Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with google’s business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they behave.

Structural remedies where the government separates the company into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most part.

The “ideal” solution is to magically stop Google from being anticompetitive but that is unrealistic.

The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its data flywheel to force it to compete.

dismalaf2• 1 year ago

Except no one is providing much evidence that Google is anti-competitive. It's more like they're simply too good at competing so competitors want to knee-cap them...

Exhibit A: Bing's top search query is "google".

l72• 1 year ago

The search part of Google doesn’t bother me. I have other options and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2) Chrome 3) Google Play Services.

Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up.

Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now.

Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.

sakoht• 1 year ago

Currently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.

stevenhuang• 1 year ago

Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.

How about no. If I must I'd really rather just Google than some fly by night companies having that access. Not to mention it'd be easier to block too.

wewewedxfgdf• 1 year ago

It really concerns me that Chrome will no longer be funded by Google.

Hydrocarb0n• 1 year ago

Google is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly, Search, web ads, email, video, maps / nav, User data / metrics.

If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you.

I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.

TechDebtDevin3• 1 year ago

Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.

Draiken• 1 year ago

We simply can't know if there would be better alternatives because of it. Any competition is acquired or dies and it has been like this for years.

But then again monopolies are the final form of capitalism so there's no real way to avoid them. Maybe on an utopia where we have strong regulations and can shield them from being influenced by money. Not gonna happen.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.

The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.

So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.

iataiatax10• 1 year ago

Having a monopoly is not against the law. Harming consumers is. The remedies should address the former not the later. Google's monopoly was earned by engineering excellence.

ankit2193• 1 year ago

It's 100% Google saves my data. And gives me an option to delete that data. It uses that data, and while I have some degree of control over it, i don't have full control over it.

As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do exactly that? Sell some data points about me generated by my interactions without my consent. That too it seems for no fee. Without even asking for the permission from the users. What kind of clown world are we living in? I dont care if its anonymized.

Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?Take permission from the users, pay them, and then use whatever they want. Data is only useful in the aggregate, pay ln the aggregate too for whatever revenue and market cap they reach. Doing it without the user consent in 2025 is weird.

stormbeard• 1 year ago

Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?

Because users are lining up to give away their data.

ankit2193• 1 year ago

Not to these companies who want it. To Google yes. Not exactly because they have to, but also because they built things people want.

tzury• 1 year ago

What happened to “win by building a better product”?

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

Garmin user here. Maybe the last one on the planet? (my kid thinks I'm nuts).

Many of the comments are about how great Google's products are (or aren't). But the case is about anti-competitive behavior. Personally, I hate how a bulk of the internet now consists of surveillance. All this amazing tech brilliance.. resting on a foundation that's about getting us to buy more junk. I will be happy if this lawsuit reduces that (even a little bit).

davkan• 1 year ago

As in a standalone car gps unit? A ton of people use Garmin fitness and backcountry gear.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 1 year ago

The USA has big tech Dutch disease.

byyoung3• 1 year ago

YC mainly trying to make a buck, I'm weary of these sorts of lawsuits

oxonia• 1 year ago

Not a good document. Needs a faded picture of a dragon on every page.

selfhoster8• 1 year ago

The villain is not Google. The villain is Y Combinator and the US Government.

selfhoster8• 1 year ago

Here is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says:

https://maps.apple.com/unsupported

"Your current browser isn't supported"

I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error.

Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I use it for the few sites I use it for) works on Linux.

Apple should be the target of breaking up. Why isn't Y Combinator and the U.S. going after them?

bathtub365• 1 year ago

Does Apple have a monopoly on web maps?

tcmart143• 1 year ago

I'll be honest, until this, I didn't even know you could go to maps in your web browser and use it there. I figured it was really for iPhones and iPads.

owl_vision• 1 year ago

Same here with firefox, FreeBSD.

ringer• 1 year ago

And of course it works when I change only the user-agent to windows.

braza2• 1 year ago

If there’s one place in the internet that people can be sincere, probably it will be here in a YC Combinator forum.

Said that… There’s a lot of interesting perspectives:

From YC: it’s a logical and quite unique business decision. YC can capitalize on a very weak moment of a gigantic moment from government support and general public sentiment.

At the end we’re in an all knives out and YC is taking the opportunistic route because it has economic interest in the Google break down.

From Google: I think we can think that the era of “cool monopoly” is officially over and Microsoft was right all the time. Be boring, be ruthless, be the only one. No amount of public good press for more than 1 decade will save your nice monopoly to fall from grace.

From the USA: will be interesting to see if the administration will celebrate it, since Google whether we like it or not, is one instrument I of soft power and influence of the American interest around the work. How the tradeoff of limit its reach due new foreign players or how pulverised market will help their policies its something to wait and see.

Form a personal perspective: as a consumer, and future candidate for a YC founding company I think have Google broke down to have 50 new SaaS selling their services for 9,99 per month, won’t be a net benefit.

Being completely honest: I prefer that the Google shareholders thar contains big billionaires and pension funds tied with retirements plus public regulatory and scrutiny it’s a way better alternative than 60 new SaaS tied with all private interests of Paul Graham VC family office or David Sachs/Chammath offices.

m101• 1 year ago

Can someone please describe what the exact monopoly position is that Google have and how they defend it?

I take it it's some sort of ads marketplace where they charge a fee to connect buyers with sellers?

But why are things like chrome and payments to companies for default search engine placement considered monopolistic?

It is increasingly sounding like a witch-hunt given the list of accusations I've heard.

US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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