Is it time to break up Google? | Hacker News Reader

Is it time to break up Google?

mobile.nytimes.com

93 pointsFuturebot74 comments

>We have been transported back to the early 20th century

>Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.”

>Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator

Reading American Economic History has given me the idea that problems of corruption were taken more seriously in the past than they are today -- which this article seems to be alluding to.

It seems to be an issue that isn't circulating today. I've never heard of someone mention Andrew Jackson with reference to how fiercely he seemed to want to fight against corruption. Lincoln gave the banks the finger and instead, empowered congress to take control of the nation's money supply, and won a war in which the banks had been betting against him by doing this. By contrast, it seems today people view big banks as a kind of mandatory evil that we should just shut up about and tolerate.

Further, it does appear that most politicians, especially Presidents, must be subservient to the interests of lobbies and power groups in Washington.

Perhaps also, today we take it for granted that a lot of good sense was taken in the past to build this country.

I have a strong sense that today's political climate and social culture is ignoring growing problems of the bigness described in the article--concentrations of power. I have heard a lot of people say everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter, which at least in my reading, appears to have not been the case in the past. If that is true, I'm not sure if America would look the same today if it wasn't true.

>By contrast, it seems today people view big banks as a kind of mandatory evil that we should just shut up about and tolerate.

On the contrary, I think the population would LOVE to vote for a President that isn't owned by Goldman Sachs, but there just isn't one. We sort of almost kinda got there with Bernie Sanders, but the establishment wouldn't let that happen.

s/establishment/votes of the people/

>but the establishment wouldn't let that happen.

It was a lot of factors, I don't think "the establishment" was solely, or even primarily, to blame.

Also, 2007-09 showed that the banks are too big to fail. They don't just go away, and they have more resources than anyone to lobby against their strong position going away, so not much we can do besides tolerate and mitigate their influence until a popular idealist get on the ticket.

It's hard to over-estimate the lengths these groups will go to in order to protect their position. We know that our wealthy will convince our government to go to war or overthrow democratically elected leaders in order to protect profits. It will probably take a revolution to unseat them.

Banks exist because people gradually forgot how to manage and store their resources over the past few thousand years. Need a safe space to store "money".

The author states that "is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale", and then points to falling profits of music and newspaper industries as the victims of said stymied innovation, the very actors that have fought the innovation of the last 25 years the hardest.

I laughed out loud at that paragraph.

To be clear: obviously the assertion itself might be true but is very possible to deny. To make matters worse, the support for the idea is basically that services that charge the end user nothing have destroyed the revenues of services that had the ability to ransom themselves for money. Whether that's good or bad to the broader public is... complicated.

I doubt that it looks that way as a peon inside the newspaper and/or music industries. It is certainly true that there is more listening to music/movies and more reading of newspaper articles than ever before.

And yet, journalists, musicians, and ... have it much harder nowadays.

Despite offhandedly mentioning the hypothetical possibility of breaking up Google, this article doesn't actually discuss how this could be done or even whether it would be possible.

I think because of how few products Google has that actually make money this would actually be quite difficult in that it would be surprisingly hard to divide up Google into multiple companies that still have sources of revenue, much less were still profitable.

Even if rather than actually "breaking up" Google, you simply tried to force some type of debundling like with Microsoft, this would still be difficult. Take the case of Android being bundled with Google services for example. Android itself isn't what makes Google money, so preventing them from integrating it with sources of revenue would probably just kill Android.

The example given is forcing them to sell DoubleClick. I think Android is a great example because that was an aquisition at one point. Google pays Apple for default search placement so a similar arrangement could be made.

The article is a bit vague and hand-wavey (and the title is a bit off) but I would definitely say that Apple is hugely monopolistic, for a company sitting at #1.

Apple has a stranglehold on iOS browsers by forcing App Store browsers to use Safari's renderer and web view.

And being vertically integrated, the hardware and software are both locked-down in ways that restrict a consumer.

Why can't I install macOS on non-Apple hardware? Why do I need macOS to develop for Mac/iPhone? Why can't I replace the battery or install memory easily on my Macbook? Each of these are shady, manipulative business practices, and lo and behold, Apple has the greatest market cap (and least competitive pricing.)

> Apple is hugely monopolistic

Being a large company doesn't make you a monopoly, nor does anti-consumer mean the same as anti-competitive. In both product segments you mention (smartphones and personal computers), Apple has a minority marketshare. "Monopoly" isn't a catch-all phrase for "mean business"; it has a very specific meaning, and Apple isn't even close.

Not clear in law, especially re questions of patent misuse - an area of the law which in the U.S. is now a mass of contradictions, admittedly.

Yes, but they have monopoly influence over iOS and Mac software as well as restricting development. It would take a Supreme Court of about a century ago to take them down, but it seems over-the-line to me, personally.

If that was your strategy as an off brand clone-OS it's not a concern, but at the $700B valuation range there should be increased scrutiny. Depends on the court system as well. See Microsoft and IE bundling? Virtually identical circumstances to mobile Safari.

> monopoly influence over iOS and Mac software as well as restricting development

This is generally not what is considered a monopoly. You're describing control over a product segment that is a small part of a larger industry.

> See Microsoft and IE bundling? Virtually identical circumstances to mobile Safari.

Except Microsoft was 95%+ of the desktop market, whereas iOS is less than 20% of the smartphone market. Bundling wasn't the problem; bundling that used one monopoly to extend another market segment is. iOS doesn't have that critical first piece.

Your whole point about Apple seems to misunderstand the meaning of monopoly.

Which market or product category do they have monopolistic dominance of?

Vertically-integrated, closed product ecosystems are not the same as a market monopoly.

Vertical integration leveraging perhaps only a single patent can certainly be illegal. Market does not mean "entire product category" in law, (but enforcement has been so weak in recent decades that's been the case de facto.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Co._v._....

The courts have already decided against you here, saying Apple both had market power and abused it re ebooks: http://macdailynews.com/2013/08/28/u-s-a-v-apple-judge-denis...

Closed ecosystem can literally be anticompetitive. Being largest in the market means they control that largest market.

I understand what you are saying and what you mean, but looking under the lens of scrutiny used around 100 years ago would lead to a different analysis. There hasn't been a trust busted in quite some time.

How can you be monopolistic without having a monopoly, however? Apple has far less than 50% market share in all the markets it operates in (except, maybe, for smartwatches...).

The majority of people does not seem to have a problem with being "locked-down" by Apple: they just buy an Android phone and Windows PC instead.

Google is very different - it has the by far largest mobile OS share and in some markets more than 90% search share. If you are a web (or -- thanks to Google Maps -- physical) business, Google can make or break you and there is nothing you can do about it. If Apple doesn't like your app, you can just develop it for Android. If Google doesn't like your webpage, no one will find it.

Monopoly power/market power don't necessarily refer only to domination of an industry, that's just the common case; network effects fall under this category even (and especially) if your company created the lock-in. Given that anti-monopoly law is being ignored these day it's unlikely you'll see enforcement extended so far, but it certainly could be. Back in the day local phone and power monopolies were very common (a close equivalent) and weren't allowed to escape regulation just 'cause their market power was local.

> Apple is hugely monopolistic, for a company sitting at #1.

In the US, generally it's OK to be a monopoly, as long as you don't abuse your monopoly by doing anti-competitive things. It's also OK to do many anti-competitive things, as long as you aren't abusing a monopoly; unfair pricing (dumping) is prohibited, but courts have been pretty lenient in the absence of a monopoly on the theory that the dumper usually damages itself more than the competition and that in the mean time consumers benefit.

So, Apple doesn't really have the market share to be considered a monopoly, unless you creatively define the market. Certainly, they can do whatever they want on Macs, because their US market share is 13% [1], and nobody can credibly accuse them of selling below cost. For mobile, it's different, but still Apple only has about 30% of the market [2], so I don't know that's really high enough to consider their behavior an abuse of monopoly, unless you narrowly define the market to be apps on iOS devices, instead of apps on (smart)phones.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3568420 table 2 [2] https://www.recode.net/2017/1/11/14239038/iphone-apple-andro...

It doesn't require Android's death, just the end of it being able to piggyback on the balance sheet of another, arguably independent, division.

In this case, that would mean forcing Android to become independently profitable, rather than a way for GoogleWebApps Inc. to "monopolize" internet endpoints on billions of devices.

One approach would be to spin out the search index and algorithms out of Google, turning it into a B2B service provider that provides (for a fee) an API that everyone could use to provide a search engine. The "remaining" Google could keep working like before, just that they would no longer have their own search technology but would buy API access like anyone else could.

This would address the idea that Internet search has become a monopoly because Google is so dominant and building up your own index and algorithms has become so expensive that no one on the free market can challenge it. (This assumes that Bing is a huge loss maker for Microsoft, Yandex and Baidu can only exist because of government interference against Google in their home markets and all the others like DuckDuckGo are relying on API access provided by these three.)

I am not sure how true this second paragraph really is and I also think there would be quite big efficiency losses by such an approach (e.g. knowing how to search the web might also be helpful for searching your email etc. and such an API model would make it very difficult to use knowledge about the user to influence search results; which is something all the privacy conscious search engines such as DDG struggle with), but at least that's what I have heard people suggest when they want to see Google broken up.

(disc: googler)

But in many ways this is anti user. There's a huge value in getting search results based on context and knowledge about you. Its nice that when I google "go", the first result is golang, whereas DDG returns Google.com, Go.com, the disambiguation page for Go on wikipedia, and finally golang.

Further, when I type "frequent flyer number" into a google search bar, it returns my personal frequent flyer number (scraped from emails). Some people (rightfully!) find that creepy and invasive. I find it incredibly useful. Making a tool used by billions of people less useful isn't good.

Yeah. I find it disconcerting to use Bing and discover the results are as bad as Google in incognito mode.

That is: search is such a hard problem that the search engine literally needs to know more about me than I know about myself to give me good search results.

This is disconcerting for fairly obvious reasons, but it also seems to be true.

It also suggests that it should be regulated like Bell. And Google does have its own version of Bell labs, Google X. Though I think the goals of them are different.

There is a big question though. Can they do what they do so well without the large size? We all know data is key here, and whoever has the most data can do the most. Can a small company get big data easily? Or do you need that amount of data?

it would be surprisingly hard to divide up Google into multiple companies that still have sources of revenue, much less were still profitable.

What strikes me the most about Google's business activities is that it has, through its ad business, basically siphoned off a large portion of the value created by the Web. It has then taken those funds and done some fairly altruistic and benevolent things. There are plenty of projects within Google (not Alphabet more broadly, but Google specifically) which are done purely to advance their mission rather than for a profit. I think Google DNS is the most visible example.

> ... preventing them from integrating it with sources of revenue would probably just kill Android.

Android is not really all that great. it has a lot of issues. maybe the death of Android would be a net positive for the mobile ecosystem. competitors would have fewer barriers and might well introduce something better.

> We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.

I couldn't really get any farther into the article than this.

How exactly is "fake news" supposed to be a symptom of abuse of monopoly power?

Are we supposed to believe that Facebook and Google's smaller competitors rigorously curate content to ensure factual accuracy?

I couldn't make it to the end of your comment to know what points you were trying to make.

I think they meant Facebook and google being the ones who decide what's fake news and what's not.

The irony is palpable in the whole manufactured fake news debate. I'm sure NYT and others want to segregate themselves from their blogspamming outbrain competitors but then they were the ones with the "99% Hillary victory" barometer based on stats with error bars pointing out of this universe..

> The third alternative is to remove the “safe harbor” clause in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act

aha.

> Jonathan Trumbull Taplin (born July 18, 1947) is an American writer, film producer and scholar

yeah, this is an op-ed for Hollywood versus the Internet. Reducing or removing the DMCA safe harbour is their number one goal this year.

Ah, so that's why his suggestions make no sense.

That, and he's a adjunct communications professor with no experience in antitrust law

This is first proposal I've heard to remove safe harbor. Where else have you seen evidence of this?

I follow music industry news, and it's been actively (rather than passively) on their wishlist for the past six months or so. It's their biggest gripe with YouTube, for instance. (That and that YouTube, unlike Spotify, refuse to give them money for nothing just because they demand it. https://rocknerd.co.uk/2017/04/03/record-labels-want-money-y... )

Yeah I'm getting a definite Jack Valenti vibe from this guy.

The threat of anti-trust to Google is good enough, I hope it's not acted on. It makes them try to play fairer than they would otherwise eg making customers can export their data. I feel like they've made more of an effort on things like GCP to make customers not locked in than their competition because they are the most in danger of getting busted up.

It'd be too bad though to break up yet another company that does interesting long term projects with a comfortable cash faucet because it is too successful.

The threat of anti-trust measures hasn't been great enough for the SEC to block the mergers that put them in control of the majority of Internet ads. It's astonishing to see how awful the ads that Google (Alphabet) serves are.

The only true monopoly Google holds is search. They have a lot of successful products in other venues but nothing that reaches 90%+ market penetration. The only other thing that's close is chrome browser.

Chrome is already starting to get some "google only" features...Like hangouts and Chromecast support. If any of these become a necessity to browse regular sites it will be a defacto monopoly on the web browser market.

Random thought, but one reason I don't like Angular is because it "shapes" your site exactly how google wants it. Much like AMP, this just makes it easy for Google to "borrow" your content for other purposes.

Chrome actually has higher desktop marketshare than I would have thought, about 60%. [1] But that's still pretty far from a monopoly.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/firefox-overtakes-m...

Consider the mobile market as well, it outnumbers desktop these days

Chrome seems to be in about the same range on mobile though, about 50%.

The threat of anti-trust to Google is good enough, I hope it's not acted on.

I can guarantee you that someone at Google had studied game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-credible_threat

Edit: To clarify, a threat must be credible for it to be effective. So a threat is only "good enough" if there is a reasonable chance it will be carried out. For example, you actually have to have nukes and be willing to use them if you threaten to nuke somebody, otherwise they'll just ignore you.

Self-serving. Google news has brought regional, independent and small journalists to the masses... much to the NYT dismay. Digital media by many, including Google, has brought with it digital journalism, journalistic data science, micro-news and multi-source real time news. It's brought readers print, video and interactive information, and machine consumable feeds. I learn more from HN daily than I do most news sources I consume directly.

NYT can raise its journalistic and UI game, or it xpcan wither and die. Either way, there will be more alternatives than ever.

Let's just say the Mr. Taplin got his way. I cannot imagine any site allowing any user content without a heck of a screening process. I really cannot think of a scenario that would allow discourse on the internet except in private forums or irc channels with no logs.

How could anyone possibly consider Google a monopoly? There's no lock-in whatsoever. If someone were to build a better search engine, you could switch to it in seconds.

That's what separates Google from Microsoft in the 90's, AT&T in the 70's, and the oil and steel barons of yore.

1997 - Apple Computer Company might as well have been called "The Beleagured Computer Maker" and Microsoft had an "unbeatable" monopoly in operating systems and browsers.

2017 - Apple is the most valuable company in the world and now known as phone company while Microsoft is still dominant in operating systems for desktops it doesn't matter and a company that barely existed in 1997 has the dominant browser and becoming the dominant desktop OS in schools.

Facebook is on top now, but so was Friendster and MySpace. Facebook is already seen as the place for "old people".

In other words. In technology, no one stays on top for long no need for the government.

Lets see. Intel has had an 80% market share since the days of the 8086. Yet here we are 30 years later and the cost for a transistor on the latest Intel chip are THOUSANDS of times cheaper than then. Tech has a pretty slippery slope for competitors that are not paranoid as Andy Grove used to say. Look at what happened to Yahoo, the Google of its day.

Without Safe Harbour, what sites will survive?

Wikipedia sure as hell won't stand for it, I can (I think reasonably, on my understanding of editor and Foundation viewpoints) tell you.

I think Intel had an 80% market share for all its days. Yet here we are 30 years past the 8086 days and transistors on the latest Intel chip are how many thousands of times cheaper than they were then? One big competitor in tech has to remain paranoid as Andy Grove said to stay alive. Look at what happened to Yahoo.

Why the hell is this flagged?

i second that. i don't see the sense in flagging this story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

That's it, I'm starting an article titled "Is Betteridge's law of headlines true?"

dun do it

It's time to stop breaking up any companies.

That is absolutely ludicrous. Monopolies are terrible for everyone except the owners of the monopolies. I've never heard anyone argue for monopolies before.

Even in the game Monopoly, the whole point is to show how bad Monopolies are!

Being large does not imply being a monopoly.

You're attacking a straw man. Someone said we need to stop breaking up companies, implying that breaking up companies (even monopolies) is always bad.

I'm not saying large companies are all monopolies. I'm saying that all monopolies are bad.

> I'm saying that all monopolies are bad.

Including regulated, natural monopolies? (I'm speaking of utilities mainly). Sure they're not great, but I can't think of a better alternative.

Yes, those are bad. Something can be bad without having a better alternative (wars can be examples).

Also, there increasingly are alternatives, like home solar panels.

True, but wars don't generally provide necessary services. That is, most people would like to avoid wars. Most people would prefer to have utilities.

I have. By and large, I agree with you, but there are some arguments to be made in favor of allowing monopolies. I find the story of Bell Labs (mentioned in the article) especially striking: a frankly unreasonable number of innovations and ideas were developed there. The creation and continued existence of Bell Labs as a dominant force would likely have been impossible without Ma Bell's monopoly.

Peter Thiel also makes a case for monopolies in Zero to One (do not interpret as an endorsement).

Monopolies are the creation of government, they are facilitated, enabled, done by governments. When you give the government the power and the legitimacy to break up companies the government will do that at its own discretion, to serve the interests of some other company, or some other greater power.

Also, what is a monopoly? Is Google a monopoly? Google provides an invaluable service for free, if monopoly means higher prices (as every textbook economics teach) for the consumer, I think you should think again about Google.

Even the U of Chicago is now warning about the concentration of corporate power in too few hands.

> Its economists used to champion big firms, but the mood has shifted

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21720657-its-economis...

What about when companies influence government policy to stake out their monopolies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T#Monopoly

I'm not a fan of breaking up companies like Google who've gotten where they are by creating a tremendous amount of value. They don't depend on government regulations to enforce favorable rules that they helped write by influencing our legislators.

Think about that critical difference.

Some companies actively undermine free markets by sponsoring the nanny state. In some cases, companies like ADM received 43% of their profits from federal subsidies. Verizon and Comcast use and influence local, state and federal regulations to carve out their duopoly markets. Financial institutions also benefit from favorable regulations that hedge/guarantee risks or subsidize profits in the form of tax breaks.

I don't think we should break up companies either, but we need to first do something about the special interests that are sucking on the teats of our government before we put any moratorium on breaking up companies. Not all monopolies/oligopolies have been earned.

I think we should something about the special interestes that are sucking on the teats of our government, but that something will never be accomplished by breaking up companies.

If the people who want to break companies want to do that because they think those companies have been manipulating the government in their interests, these people should think again: isn't breaking up a company a government action? Isn't the act of breaking up a company a government act that could -- and probably will -- be influenced by a company?

You missed the part where I wrote:

> I don't think we should break up companies either...

Here's my point: I too am hesitant to break up monopolies for most circumstances, but compared to the rampant regulatory capture that's happening all around us every day, it's almost a non-issue.

We should focus on the policies that are actively undermining free economy principles before we shoot for lofty standards.

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